Category Archives: Accelerators

AlphaLab and TechStars

Congratulations to the team at AlphaLab for the announcement that they are one of 16 national accelerators to join the TechStars Network.  I have always believed that AlphaLab was a top-quartile accelerator, and their acceptance into this branded accelerator network gives some further proof.
The real question… what will this mean or really do for AlphaLab?  [...]

Ask The VC – How Will The Accelerator Trend Affect VC?

Jon Cavell, aka the famous @BurgherJon, follows up to a post I made yesterday about the difference between accelerators and incubators:
@aveeck a follow up to your post this morning, how does the rise of accelerators impact the VC process? #AskTheVC
I think the proliferation of accelerators is a great boon to the entire startup economy, and hence to [...]

Accelerators vs. Incubators

There was a good article in today’s New York Times about business incubators.
Can anybody guess the number of incubators?  I was stunned (maybe I shouldn’t have been) that there are over 1200, and they have their own association group.
Incubators often house a large collection of different types of business – small and medium sized businesses [...]

AlphaLab Accepting Applications!

Image via CrunchBase

I am an advisor with AlphaLab, our local Pittsburgh business accelerator, and if you have a killer startup idea and are looking for the motivation to just GTD, I would strongly encourage you to consider applying to be a part of the program.  I have participated on the selection committee for all the [...]

Zipano – Manage Your Personal Information

Zipano wants to be the central clearinghouse for control of your personal data that you share online.  “The debate about privacy is really the debate about control,” said the founder of Facebook – and Zipano wants to give that control to the user in an easy, flexible, intuitive way.
Their first product, Locaccino, is a Facebook [...]

Vivo – Live Video Broadcasting on the Web

Vivo, which started out its life as a hardware company, is next up.  They are building a platform to allow live online broadcasting.  (AlphaLab has a livestream running based on the Vivo solution – but it is closed to the public – sorry guys, BIG FAIL.  OPEN IT UP!).

The idea is not a new one [...]

NavPrescience – Personalized Navigation Solutions

Post-break, the room is full – SRO.  Next up:
NavPrescience, a CMU spinout, is looking to build a smarter GPS solution that learns from the user.  By using predictive and personalized routing, they aim to make your GPS device (which is likely to be your mobile phone in a few years) much smarter.
The company is taking [...]

LeftRight Studios – Fun Mobile Games

LeftRight Studios is all about building fun, compelling mobile games.  Geraldine Yong is presenting for the team; these are some very compelling gritty gaming guys who have just rolled out their second game for the iPhone.
Their first big hit was smackBOTS, a digital version of the plastic analog favorite, Rock’em-Sock’em Robots.

These guys have done a [...]

fooala – Giving Restaurants an Online and Mobile Storefront

fooala is building what it calls “Food 2.0″ – making it easier for restaurants to access their customers and diners to find the food they want to eat.  They want to “sell food the right way on the internet.”
The founding team out of CMU is big and successful (if not enthusiastic enough – David, light [...]

CloudFab – the Digital Fabrication Marketplace

First up is CloudFab,  a company I have been close to since its inception.  I was initially very skeptical about the prospects for the success of this company, but I am very impressed with what the entrepreneurs, Nick Pinkston and Steve Klabnik, have been able to build.
The idea is to democratize “distributed desktop manufacturing” by [...]